since we have been married my husband jokes that i only buy ingredients and not food at the store. I KIND OF LIKE THAT. these are my adventures of preparing meals with basic, real food ingredients and eliminating convenience foods.

Friday, November 16, 2012

I know it has been a while since I have posted anything here, but one of the reasons is that I have been spending so much time canning as much as I can. In the quest to eat healthier, I have decided to eliminate as much processed foods and I can and to prepare as much as I possibly can myself. So I have canning. I grew up in a gardening and canning family, so I learned a lot from them. They froze a lot of their foods though and I would prefer to have things in jars. One reason being that I wouldn't have to worry about my food in case of a power outage and another is that I just have the freezer that is on my fridge, I don't have a separate one so the amount of food that I can freeze is pretty minimal.

Because the size of my kitchen is pretty small and I have very little storage I was running out of room to store my jars of food. I already had one stainless steel shelf in my kitchen and decided a matching shelf system would solve a lot of my storage issues. I bought this five shelf system at Lowes and bought two additional shelves. The bottom shelf is tall enough to hold both of my canners and then I arranged the other shelves just for enough apart to allow me to to move quart jars around. I have three baskets on top. One holds tools such as funnels, jar grabber, food mill, and unused lids. The middle one is full of bands. The last one has consumables that I use like clear gel, pectins, citric acid and things like that.

So here is the back wall of my kitchen with both shelves side by side:

I am pretty happy with the extra storage that this gives me. And I am VERY happy that my kitchen looks much less cluttered.